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Monday, May 9, 2011

Too Many Plates, Not Enough Sticks

At my job we are always working on our development, both personal and professional, and a common theme seems to appear in mine. I procrastinate, I am a terrible planner, and extremely disorganized. My words, no one else's. However that is not the theme to which I am referring. There is a prevailing roadblock that prevents me from writing to what I believe is my potential. This roadblock is “What Does Finished Look Like?” Damned if I cannot answer that question.

This made me come face to face with a strength and a weakness all rolled into one.

The strength – I have a story in my head.

The weakness – it is floating around in fragments of no particular order, with no real end in sight and I cannot seem to tell it.

Yes, I think I could write it if I could see the end. Right now it is a jumbled mess that I know will take a lot of work, focus, and dedication to tell it. I have never been good at working backwards. I sat in on a project meeting at work where we were laying out a road map and knowing what finished looked like made all the previous pieces fall into place like dominoes – but in reverse. I know it will work if I apply this same process to writing. Am I simply too lazy to do the work? Do I have what it takes? Not to mention finding the quiet time (because yes, I now need quiet in order to really focus) when time is at a premium for me.

I always thought I was a linear writer because I could not move on to part B until part A was perfect, and I mean perfect. I struggle with plucking written scenes from a cloud and making it work. Even if I think of it as a puzzle with all the pieces on the board that I just need to assemble, it is still very very hard. Some excellent advice I received from a blog mate was to just write it as it comes. Editing can come later. Since I get stuck trying to perfect where I am instead of moving forward this was a critical piece of advice. And it worked. Lately I have found that assembling from the pieces I have floating in the cloud is working.

How do you make it happen? How do you turn those abstract ideas in a concrete foundation for a story/novel? I am certainly trying.

2 comments:

Oh, I completely missed this post. You know, this is a huge issue of mine. I haven't quite thought of it as a weakness because this is what makes my story structures sort of unique.

It is difficult though. I end up writing a lot of notes to myself, trying to connect ideas. I write out scenes, and then find out that while that scene was helpful and had things I could use, I was headed in the wrong direction and have to take the scene out entirely or combine it with another scene.

I even tried taking out a piece of paper on Friday and writing out all the threads in the story and then linking them so that I won't forget anything as I work.